Whilst the spark for the Al Aqsa Intifada was the events that followed General Sharon’s visit to the Haram Al Sharief in Jerusalem; the tinder it ignited was the anger of a people who were promised a state in 1993 and have since then seen only deeper poverty and more oppression.
The 1993 Oslo Agreement did not lay the basis for an independent Palestinian State, as Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO)claimed at the time. In fact it was a complete surrender to the Zionists. The Agreement set up a Palestinian Interim Self-Governing Authority (PISGA) confined to Jericho on the West Bank and Gaza. The agreement denied PISGA any authority over settlements in the Occupied Territories, or over Israeli citizens in any part of the Occupied Territories. It had no power over foreign relations, nor any control over Arab East Jerusalem. By contrast, the Israeli army and police continued to have unimpeded access to all PISGA territory. Ruled out of the negotiations from the outset was the fate of the three to four million refugees, descendants of those driven out by Zionist terror in 1948.
The Agreement was the dictat of a victorious colonial power, brokered by its staunchest ally, US imperialism. Arafat and the PLO not only capitulated, but worse, they proclaimed the disaster to be a victory, one which would guarantee the Palestinian people their own state. In reality, the PISGA (and the Palestinian Authority (PA) which it later became) were a mechanism to get the PLO to police the Palestinian people on behalf of the Zionists. As Arafat was obliged to declare at the time, ‘PLO renounces the use of terrorism and other acts of violence and will assume responsibility over all PLO elements and personnel in order to assure their compliance, prevent violations and discipline violators.’ It was to be no empty promise; by 1995 he had built up a repressive apparatus with eight or nine different forces, numbering 50,000. Its cost of $500m per year left nothing to be spent on health or education. From the outset, the PA co-operated closely with the Zionist occupation forces, arresting and torturing Hamas and Jihad supporters as well as other opponents of the PA; many have died in PA custody.
Whilst hundreds of millions of dollars were pumped into Palestine by foreign governments, NGOs, and even remittances from the Zionist state, none of it got to the Palestinian people. Instead, Arafat and his cronies salted much of it away in overseas accounts. In September 1998, the Daily Telegraph wrote that ‘despite its talk of peace, the previous Labour government expanded Jewish settlements and repeatedly sealed off the West Bank and Gaza Strip…and impoverished the Palestinians’. Palestinian GDP has now fallen by 35% since 1993; average income is $1,500 compared to $2,500 in 1987, whilst average Israeli income is $17,800. In 1987, 80,000 Palestinian workers from Gaza crossed into Israel for work every day, a source of cheap Labour for the Zionist economy. By 1993, this had fallen to 30,000, and now stands at 22,000. The Zionists have adopted a deliberate policy of replacing Palestinian workers with illegal immigrants from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union since they are easier to control, and when necessary, to expel.
Years of agreements and negotiations leading up to the Camp David discussions this summer produced nothing new. Since Oslo, the Zionists have consolidated their grip on the West Bank, finishing a programme of road building which connected all the settlements and army bases. These roads, for the exclusive use of Zionist settlers and the army, have completed the bantustanisation of Palestinian villages and towns. Settlements now occupy 40% of Gaza; 75% of the West Bank and Jerusalem has been confiscated for Jewish use only. Israel still proclaims its sovereignty over the Occupied Territories. The imperialists are now saying that the deal that Israeli Prime Minister Barak offered the PLO in July was so generous that Arafat was a fool to turn it down. In fact, the Zionists continued to reject the right of return of Palestinian refugees, refused to offer them any compensation, rejected rights for Palestinians living in East Jerusalem and refused to give up the illegal settlements in the Occupied Territories. In these circumstances, it is no wonder that the anger of the Palestinian people caught fire, and that the Zionists provided the match.
General Sharon: Butcher of Beirut
Palestinians remember General Sharon as the butcher of Beirut. In June 1982 he led the Israeli onslaught on the Lebanon to drive out the PLO whose headquarters were in Beirut. The Israeli air force blasted Beirut to bits with implosion bombs and guided missiles. It also used phosphorous bombs against civilians; phosphorous catches fire on contact with water, and so burned when inhaled by its victims. Some 20,000 people were killed in the bombardment. Later, in September, his forces encouraged its fascist allies in the Lebanese Phalange to enter Palestinian refugee camps at Sabra and Chatila and massacre 2,500 defenceless men, women and children with appalling bestiality.
The Al Aqsa Intifada
Two months after the Al Aqsa Intifada started on 27/28 September, the Zionist onslaught on the Palestinian people continues. Helicopter gunships firing heavy machine guns and guided missiles have attacked Palestinian towns and villages which are also encircled by Israeli tanks. Snipers using softened bullets have shot hundreds of youths armed with nothing more than stones. Paramilitary settlers supported the Israeli army, torturing captured Palestinians and firing on defenceless villagers. 250 people have been killed, thousands injured, many with gunshot wounds to the head and upper bodies. Amongst the dead are some 40 children, including Mohammed Al Durreh, shot in cold blood as he hid terrified behind his father in Gaza on the second day of the Intifada. Yet despite the terror the Palestinian people continue to resist. Each funeral is accompanied by mass demonstrations; incredible courage is shown by youth with their slings and stones facing up to one of the most powerful armies in the world. More recently as the Fatah alliance has started to fragment, armed groups, the tamsin, are adopting guerrilla tactics which have started to take their toll of Israeli soldiers and the settler paramilitaries.
Whilst General Sharon’s visit to the Haram Al Sharief, which houses the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, has been seen to be the starting point of the Intifada, it was the events of the following day which really sparked it. A massive Israeli police and army presence confronted worshippers when they arrived for prayers at the Al Aqsa mosque, and when Palestinian youths responded to the provocation with stones, the Zionists hit back, killing seven demonstrators and injuring 200 more. The next day the uprising spread throughout the Occupied Territories and into Israel itself, as Israeli Arabs took to the streets. By this time the Israelis were already using rubber-coated steel bullets and exploding dum-dums. Of 550 Palestinians injured that day, 175 were under the age of 18. By 1 October, sections of the Palestinian police force were joining the demonstrators, and the first two Israeli soldiers had been killed in gun battles. A week later the death toll was 78, including at least 12 children. Israelis in Nazareth attacked Israeli Arabs, killing one, whilst police killed another two.
With neither the Palestinian Authority nor the Zionists capable of controlling the anger of the people, alarm bells rang for western imperialism. On 14 October, US President Clinton convened a summit at Sharm el Sheikh in Egypt. The mass of the Palestinian people urged Arafat not to attend, knowing that US imperialism would support the Zionists all the way. Arafat ignored the calls for a boycott, hoping he might get some crumbs from the imperialist table. But the people were right: when the summit concluded, new security agreements had been reached, the details of which were to remain secret, but which gave a field role to CIA agents. There was to be no Zionist withdrawal or ceasefire. Meanwhile the slaughter continued: by this time 112 were dead and 3,300 injured. On 2 November, the Israeli Defence Force said that only two deaths were being investigated by the Israelis including that of Mohammed Al Durreh. On 9 November, a helicopter gunship attack on Bethlehem killed the local Fatah leader Hussein Abayat and two women relatives; the Israelis claimed he was responsible for the death of three soldiers. A week later, on 16 November Harald Fischer, a German citizen living in Bethlehem was blown to pieces by an Israeli missile. Five other Palestinians were killed on the same day.
In this vastly unequal war, the allies of the Zionists in the imperialist world are legion. There is of course the US government. Within days of the start of the Intifada, US Secretary State Madeleine Albright spoke of stone-throwing Palestinians ‘laying siege to Israel’. When the UN Security Council condemned the Zionists’ excessive use of force, the US abstained…as did Britain. Already by 6 October, Arab governments were reported as incensed by the Labour government’s attitude; Blair had made no public comment and both Robin Cook and his deputy Peter Hain had pointedly refused to offer any criticism of Israel or indeed of General Sharon’s provocation. Liberal commentators in newspapers such as The Guardian and The Observer speak of ‘extremists’ on both sides, implicitly equating Palestinians fighting for freedom with the neo-fascist settlers. Peter Beaumont in The Observer of 19 November claimed that the uprising was being planned by the PA as far back as a year ago. This is no more than Zionist disinformation and serves only to confuse people as to the real nature of the Palestinian struggle.
With the Al Aqsa Intifada set to continue, all democrats and socialists must dismiss the mealy-mouthed liberalism which in the end excuses the settler, colonial character of the Zionist regime. There can be no peace in the Middle East until there is justice for the Palestinians; there can be no justice for the Palestinians until the Zionist state has been destroyed. All socialists and democrats must support the Palestinian people.
Isolate the racist Zionist state!
Victory to the Palestinian people!
Robert Clough
Children – the death toll
Whilst many people will remember the terrible images of Mohammed Al Durreh captured by a Palestinian film crew in the last moments of his short life, he was the first of dozens of children who have been murdered by the Zionist war machine. 11-year-old Mohammed Abu-Assishot was shot in the head whilst throwing stones on 4 October. By 21 October, 34 children had been killed. On 4 November, 13-year-old Ghazala Jaradet was shot in the head with a rubber bullet whilst she was walking home from school near Hebron. The Israeli army claimed that Ghazala was injured in a car crash and that her family and doctors fabricated the story. Settlers, too have murdered children. On 18 October, they shot2-year-old Sara Al Haq as her father drove her home following a vain attempt to get hospital treatment for her temperature. The Israelis claimed that she was shot when her father was cleaning his gun; later, that he opened fire on the settlers first. A few days later, he was seized and detained on the grounds that he was an organiser of the Intifada.
Zionism: its first 50 years
Despite Israel’s repeated breaches of international law, it receives unstinting support from the United States, Britain and the European Union as a whole. Israel is no ordinary state. It was artificially created and is externally sustained. It is a racist, colonial-settler state founded by Britain and the USA to safeguard their economic and military interests in a region which holds 66 per cent of the world’s known oil reserves.
The colonisation of Palestine
Long before the creation of the Israeli state on 15 May 1948, a founder of Zionism, Theodore Herzl, declared that ‘England with her possessions in Asia should be most interested in Zionism…The shortest route to India is by way of Palestine.’
And so it was to prove. In 1917 Britain had issued the Balfour Declaration endorsing the idea of a homeland for Jews. At this time there were 60,000 Jews in Palestine compared to 700,000 Arabs. Arabs owned 91% of the land of Palestine, Jews 4%; others owned the rest. In the following decades this picture was to change completely. Zionist settlement began by purchasing land from Arab feudal lords, expelling the Palestinian peasants who came with the land. In their stead Jewish immigrants were put to work on the land. A rigid apartheid system was at once instituted. Arabs were banned from working on land purchased by the Zionists. A Zionist leader Joseph Weitz was to state ‘among ourselves it must be clear that there is no place in the country for both peoples together…Transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries, transfer all of them, not one village or tribe should remain.’
British imperialism and Zionism
This ‘transfer ‘was accomplished with remorseless brutality. It started with the Palestinian uprising of 1936-39. When the uprising began in April1936 British forces responded with massive repression, dynamiting Palestinian homes, criminalising Palestinian freedom fighters and killing 1,000 people by the end of the year. A British Settlement Police was formed which was in effect a Zionist militia, armed and trained by the British. By 1939 this force numbered 21,500 Zionists and was to form the core of the Israeli army. The British also created death squads known as Special Night Squads. By the time the uprising was finally defeated in 1939, 5,000 Palestinians had been murdered and 15,000 maimed and wounded. As a Palestinian peasant put it ‘the British were the cause of our catastrophe and the catastrophe was Zionism. So we asked the people: who is your first enemy? Britain. The second enemy? Zionism. Why? Because Britain is responsible. Britain protects them and persecutes us.’ The defeat of the uprising was decisive in consolidating Zionism and the development of the nucleus of the Zionist state. This could not have happened without British support. By 1943, Jews constituted 31% of the population; in 1917 they had been less than 8%.
Zionist terror 1945-1953
Where trickery or collaboration with the Arab ruling classes didn’t succeed in driving the Palestinian peasants from their homes, fascist violence did. The Irgun and Stern Gangs specialised in terrorising Palestinians into fleeing the land. Indeed a systematic strategy of terror was devised in 1948 to drive out 750,000 Palestinians. It was known as Plan Dalet (D). It amounted to organised ‘ethnic cleansing’. On 9April 1948, for example, terrorist killers from Irgun led by Menachem Begin (a future Prime Minister) attacked the village of Deir Yassin and massacred 250 defenceless men, women and children. A witness, Red Cross Doctor de Reynier, said: ‘All I could think of was the SS troops I had seen in Athens.’ Begin sent his troops a message: ‘Accept congratulations on this splendid act of conquest.’
Deir Yassin was no isolated act. In the village of Safsaf, 70 men were blindfolded and shot dead. In Elabun, Zionist commanders lined the inhabitants up in the village square, shouting ‘You want to make war, here you have it!’ and gunned down 13 people. In Safed, a Zionist witness recalls how she saw an intelligence officer beat ten wounded men ‘with a hoe until they bled to death.’ It was methods such as these that led to the Palestinians’ exodus. Of the 370 Zionist settlements built between 1948 and 1953, 350 were on land confiscated from the Palestinians to accommodate the 684,000 settlers who arrived in the same period.
The Zionist state was built on land confiscated from the Palestinians. In 1945, three years before the foundation of Israel, Zionists still owned only 14%of the land; 80% was still owned by the Palestinians. In 1948 750,000of the 1.3m Palestinians, over half the population, was forced to flee – to Jordan, Lebanon and the rest of the Arab world. In that same year the state of Israel was founded on 72% of the historic land of Palestine. And after the 1967 Six Day war, with the conquest of the West Bank, Zionists controlled 84% to the Palestinians’ 14%.
Zionism on the regional stage
From the moment of its foundation in 1948, Israel set about playing its assigned role in the Middle East: attacking Arab nationalist and revolutionary movements which threatened imperialist control of the region’s oil. In 1956 Israel joined the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt that failed to overthrow Nasser’s government after it nationalised the Suez Canal. The Six Day War constituted yet another orchestrated offensive against a rising tide of Arab and Palestinian nationalism. Israel occupied the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula. Despite repeated UN resolutions, it has refused to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In 1982 Israel launched a massive invasion of Lebanon, butchering 25,000 people, to destroy an alliance between Lebanese and Palestinian revolutionary forces.
Within Israel itself, Zionism maintains a regime of discrimination and oppression against Palestinians who constitute 20% of Israel’s population. Since1948, 80% of Arab land in Israel has been confiscated. 92% of the land of Israel is reserved for Jews only – Palestinians cannot buy, rent or lease in these areas. In the face of incontrovertible evidence, the UN in 1975 passed Resolution 3397 which ruled ‘that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.’ Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and as a result of Zionist and US pressure, this resolution has now been withdrawn. But Israel’s character remains unchanged.
…and on the international stage
Israel plays its reactionary role beyond the boundaries of the Middle East. It functions as a substitute US military force. Whenever the US has political difficulties in supplying anti-democratic or fascist regimes with guns, bombs and torture equipment, Israel, with US financial support, fills the breach. In 1979 Israel Aircraft Industries built an electrified fence on the Angolan-Namibian border to thwart Namibian guerrillas. In the same year Israel and apartheid South Africa jointly developed an atomic bomb. During the height of the struggle to isolate South Africa, Israel was apartheid’s main arms supplier. Between 1970 and 1979 South Africa purchased 35% of all Israel’s weapon sales.
In the Middle East Israel remains the main mechanism for sustaining US predominance. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, US-Israeli collaboration has grown. The US has also sponsored an alliance between Israel and Turkey as an axis to guard against upheaval in the Middle East and in order to project its influence into the resource-rich ex-Soviet central Asian states. According to The Financial Times, recently-signed agreements between Israel and Turkey, besides sharing intelligence and training to ‘combat terrorism’, also ‘opened up a route into central Asian markets for Israeli companies.’
US dollars sustain racist Israel
Israel can sustain its regional and international role only as a result of a massive infusion of US dollars. Israel is sustained almost entirely by imperialist money. Each year billions of dollars are given to Israel: between 1948 and 1995, the US pumped in $140bn. Annual aid averaged$5bn in the 1990s with $10bn in loan guarantees. All this aid has no strings attached. Israel is also the highest per capita recipient of US aid.
Through such aid Zionism has built for imperialism one of the most powerful military machines in the world; it has also secured for imperialism a powerful and loyal social base. This financial assistance has bound the majority of Israel’s population to imperialism by giving most Jewish citizens an imperialist standard of living amidst a sea of regional poverty. It has created a privileged stratum of Zionists like the privileged whites of South Africa, who for years sustained the barbarism of apartheid. Indeed all the vicious and brutal racism of apartheid’s white minority is mirrored in Israel’s Zionist population and especially among those colonial settlers directly engaged in robbing Palestinians of their land. It is through such robbery that the Zionist population can sustain a privileged and comfortable existence.
The destruction of Palestine
Having colonised and absorbed the majority of Palestine, the Zionists are working to destroy the last hope of an independent Palestine. By means of apartheid-like legislation they have systematically undermined the possibility of an independent Palestinian agriculture and economy.
On land requiring intensive water irrigation, Palestinians have virtually no rights to dig new wells. Water from existing Palestinian wells is also siphoned off to irrigate land confiscated by colonial settlers. Today some 350,000 settlers, who account for only 13% of the population, consume80% of the West Bank’s water. 75% of the West Bank and Jerusalem is ‘confiscated’, earmarked for Jewish use alone.
The ‘peace process’, has further weakened the Palestinian economy. Today there is no free passage between the supposedly autonomous regions of Gaza and the West Bank. All commercial traffic between these areas is in Israeli hands. Repeated closures of the border are devastating the Palestinian economy. For example, with trucks halted for days, it is cheaper for West Bank traders to import tomatoes from Spain than from Gaza. Repeatedly, Palestinian produce is left to rot at Israeli roadblocks and prohibitions are imposed on importing raw materials into areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority.
Meanwhile the tide of Zionist colonisers keeps flowing into the West Bank. By 1998, the number of settlers in the Occupied Territories had risen by nearly 50% from 106,000 to 152,000, and now number well over 200,000. Today these fully- armed settlers occupy some 145 settlements dotted around the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Strategically placed, with state funded programmes for massive expansion, these settlements, together with Israeli army roadblocks, have ensured that the major Palestinian population centres are reduced to isolated clusters, cut off from each other and dependent entirely on Israeli authority – Bantustans. A system of 58 roadblocks prevents Palestinians from travelling from the south to the north of the West Bank. Meanwhile, East Jerusalem was being ethnically cleansed of Palestinians, so that by 1994Palestinians were in a minority.
The January 1997accords only strengthened the hand of Israeli colonialism. As The Financial Times noted at the time, the agreement ‘will mean the Israelis will remain in control of the rural areas of the West Bank, continuing to surround Palestinian towns with Israeli troops and expanding Jewish settlements further, so that in effect they renege on the Oslo accords.’ Although imperialism held out great hopes for a final ‘peace’ settlement being achieved by summer 2000, Arafat could not deliver. Whilst he has capitulated at every stage of the ‘peace’ process, the Palestinian people have not. Their history is one of constant struggle, from the 1987Intifada to today.
The lesson is clear: the Palestinian people will never be subjugated
FRFI 158 December 2000 / January 2001
